Five years ago, a combination of dry conditions and heavy winds starting on Labor Day quickly accelerated the spread of multiple wildfires that broke out in Oregon’s Western Cascades. The Labor Day fires killed 11 people, burned more than 1 million acres and destroyed more than 4,000 homes from Clackamas County down to the California border.

More than a dozen fires of a thousand acres or more were burning simultaneously across Oregon by that weekend.

5 years ago the Labor Day fires scorched Oregon. What has the state learned?

The Almeda Fire destroyed more than 2,600 homes in Talent, Phoenix, Medford and Ashland. The South Obenchain Fire burned 33 other Jackson County homes. Three roaring fires merged into a conflagration in the Santiam Canyon, destroying 1,500 structures and decimating Detroit. In the McKenzie River corridor, the Holiday Farm Fire razed thousands of structures and wiped out most of the community of Blue River.

OPB’s “Think Out Loud” spoke with four survivors of those fires.

Misty Rose Muñoz, Almeda fire

On September 8, 2020, the day the Almeda Fire started, Misty Rose Muñoz was living in a mobile home at Medford Estates between Medford and Phoenix. She described the 40-year-old mobile home as a “fixer-upper” that she bought on a credit card, but it meant a great deal to her.

“I loved it, put a lot of money and love into it, bought it to raise my kid in it, and to have my family there for several years,” she said. “It was my security. It was my first purchased home, my safety net, a place to create memories with my kid.”

Muñoz said she was driving to get an X-ray in Ashland when she passed a small grass fire, unaware that this was the beginning of the Almeda Fire, which would change her life.

“I actually drove by the fire, saw it when it was in its infancy, and actually called my daughter and let her know that we had a little grass fire,” she said.

Muñoz said she didn’t think much of it and continued with her day, visiting a friend. Then a family member called her, saying they saw planes moving toward her home.

“That’s when I knew we were in trouble,” she said. Muñoz tried to go back home to her daughter, but there were burned cars on some roads and gridlock on others as people tried to escape the fire.

“It was a terrifying moment, knowing that my 13-year-old kid was at home and I had no way of getting to her at all,” she said.

She didn’t reunite with her daughter until days later. Muñoz’s daughter stayed with her brother, who lived nearby. Muñoz said it was a helpless feeling being only 15 minutes away from her daughter but unable to reach her.

“It was a couple days later when the roads opened, I-5. 99 wasn’t open for a long while, but the I-5 opened back up and she was able to come to where I was staying,” she said.

When Muñoz was able to return home to assess the damage, her mobile home was still standing but unlivable. There were burn holes in the roof, and electrical and plumbing damage. The windows were popped out of their frames and so smoke-damaged the glass could no longer be seen through.

“We were able to enter the home, but when we did, we were driving through what looked like a war zone. Stuff was still on fire, smoke was still smoldering, shards of glass, metal objects that we couldn’t even tell what the item was before the fire. It was pretty devastating,” she said.

Muñoz was able to get an insurance payout but she ran into a problem.

“It was a 100% payout based on the coverage that I had for a home that I had been fixing up. I didn’t know, as a homeowner, that I needed to increase my insurance policy as I made improvements,” she said.

Still, Muñoz is thankful for the insurance money, saying she must have angels on her side.

“I’ve have had what feels like a pretty harrowing last five years,” she said. She described moving around from place to place, taking out a family loan to buy another mobile home and dealing with mold in a rental apartment in Portland. The hope of fire victim relief money was there but it often seemed out of reach.

“Like all other fire survivors, we were caught in the red tape of that money being released,” she said.

It wasn’t until 2025 — five years after the fire — that Muñoz received a federal grant. With assistance from the Homeless Engagement Assistance and Resource Team, or HEART, Muñoz bought a home in the Rogue Valley.

“It’s surreal. I had waited so long for that HEART program to happen that I didn’t actually believe that it was going to happen. So when it did happen and the process moved so quickly from November to March that it felt like a dream,” she said.

“I’m still pinching myself because it doesn’t even seem real still. The house is beautiful. And it meets my needs.”

But owning another home comes with the risk of losing it again. While wildfires continue to grow in frequency and intensity, funding, resources and staff to combat them have decreased.

“The idea of fire and loss again, after acquiring a home, is a very real fear and trauma for fire survivors,” Muñoz said. “Something that seems completely innocent and not a threat can become a threat very quickly.”

Their mobile home parks burned. Now rent is due.

Susan McMillan, Almeda

Susan McMillan lost her home and most of her possessions in the Almeda Fire. She was able to evacuate with a handful of possessions, her family’s dogs Chico, Boehne and Sammy, and cat, Kiki.

McMillan appeared on OPB’s “Think Out Loud” in September 2020, two weeks after the Almeda Fire broke out near Ashland.

She recalled it was very windy on the day of the fire. Shortly after leaving for work her son returned home, saying he had to turn around because he couldn’t get through the pass because of a fire in Ashland.

“Well, don’t do what I did,” she said of her wildfire response at the time. “If I could give advice to anybody who’s listening to this, it would be to be prepared, have a plan and a go bag, a real one. I mean, look it up online.”

She said she saw her neighbor, who warned them of the danger while gathering his own family to evacuate.

“He says, ‘You know, it’s coming this way. It’s gone through Ashland, it’s going through Talent. It’s heading our direction and it’s really, really bad,’” she said.

“I went back into my house. I just threw a pair of, I don’t know, cutoffs and a t-shirt and dog food and a deck of cards and a bottle of wine and zipped that up and, oh, some papers. I gathered up some photographs of my family and threw those in there.”

She also gathered all the animals in the house, a dog that belonged to her son, as well as two of her own dogs and her cat. McMillan described upending furniture to retrieve the terrified cat. They stayed with a friend nearby but had to evacuate there as well.

The group relocated again to a house in Central Point and stayed the night.

“In the morning, I was out on the porch and my neighbor had snuck into the area and videotaped our neighborhood. And that’s when I knew I had lost my home,” McMillan said.

McMillan’s daughter set up a GoFundMe page for her. McMillan wrote a thank-you letter to express her gratitude to the people who donated. She shared a part of that letter in her August appearance on “Think Out Loud.”

“A home is where you document your life. It contains framed photos of your family and ancestors, souvenirs collected from places you have been, cookbooks, travel books, history books, a foot imprint with the date of your grandchild, displayed proudly on a bookshelf.

Photo albums, heirlooms, a ziplock bag that held the Christmas socks with your father’s scent still on them, or a delicately etched pink glass cake plate bought by my mom and her brother John when they were children, costing 25 cents and purchased at Woolworth’s in Modesto to give to my grandma Nana on her birthday. I had that heirloom. Handmade quilts, Christmas decorations collected over the years, snippets of hair from your children’s first haircuts.

So it’s not just stuff, is it? And this is what hurts. As time passed, it hurts when your home becomes known as a ‘stick dwelling,’ and is referred to as toxic waste to be disposed of. And it hurts to drive through towns to run errands and see so much devastation and familiar landmarks that are not recognizable anymore,” she said.

After the fire, McMillan found a home in Sonoma County, California.

“California is where I’m from. I have roots there and that’s where I’m at now. I’m very happy here and I’ve rebuilt a life and I volunteer and I do some wonderful things for this community that I live in, and I’m just delighted with the way things have gone,” she said.

McMillan said her insurance company was great to work with, but she’s still dealing with paperwork five years after the fire.

“Dealing with them to replace things that I had is kind of a hassle that you have to go through,” she said.

McMillan said she keeps in contact with her friends from her friends in Jackson County. Like Muñoz, she worries about the threat of another fire.

McMillan said she now volunteers with Law Enforcement Chaplaincy of Sonoma County, something she wouldn’t have done without the experience of the fire.

“I have much more empathy for people who are going through hard times,” she said. “I think that deep down inside all of us there is such a strong human connection that comes out in people, whether they’ve experienced anything like this or not.”

Russ Boyd, Beachie Creek

Russ Boyd is a resident and business owner in Detroit and a survivor of the fire in Santiam Canyon.

In the days leading up to Labor Day 2020, Boyd was closely following the Beachie Creek fire as it neared Detroit. He recalled keeping up with a bulletin board outside Mountain High Grocery, where all the latest fire information was displayed.

“We were just maintaining, trying to stay informed about it. We didn’t realize how bad it was going to get, though — very shortly,” he said.

Boyd said he was eating lunch with his wife at the restaurant where she worked when they noticed the smoke was getting worse. That evening, he recalled receiving a call from a fellow volunteer firefighter, who said it was time to prepare for evacuation.

“Within a few hours from us getting off work or whatnot, from like six to eight o’clock, it seemed like it pretty much blew up really big,” he said.

He described worried calls throughout the community and at midnight a police car rolled through the neighborhood with a siren, warning everyone to leave now.

Boyd and his wife packed up their car and left but they had a few stops to make to pick up family members.

“We weren’t going to leave without the whole family,” he said. “You can see the Beachie Creek fire just coming. It almost looked like lava coming down the mountain,” he said. “It was starting to scare us quite a bit, and we had to drive up to Idanha, which is about four miles a little east of Detroit, to go pick up the rest of the family.”

He said they initially drove away from the Beachie Creek Fire but soon realized they were driving into the path of the Lionshead Fire. When they heard from a friend that trees fell on Highway 22, blocking it, they turned around.

“Through Gates, Mill City, it was just fire all along on the side of the highways, super smoky. Couldn’t see 20 feet in front of you,” Boyd said. He estimated that the drive was about 30 to 45 minutes long.

“I’m originally from Miami, Florida, and been through some Category 5 hurricanes, and that was the scariest situation I’ve ever been in.”

The family met up with family members in a grocery store parking lot in Salem and started calling hotels, eventually finding one available in Albany.

“We got the family all set up with a couple of hotel rooms and started from there to figure out what was still left of the town,” Boyd said. They stayed in the hotel for a couple of weeks.

About 48 hours after they evacuated, Boyd said they started getting calls from firefighters and officers about the severity of the devastation.

The home Boyd and his wife rented didn’t burn down, but several homes belonging to their family members did.

“So many family heirlooms and collections of stuff, it was just gone,” he said.

When he was able to see the damage for himself, Boyd said it was one of the moments that made him feel that this fire was worse than the hurricanes he had experienced in Florida.

“Hurricane, you could kind of collect your stuff back up, you know,” he said. “But in the fire, it was very shocking to realize everything was gone, you know, burnt to ashes.”

The couple considered moving but ultimately decided to stay in Detroit.

“Only time will tell to see what the future holds for Detroit, but it’s been very difficult for businesses to rebuild,” he said.

When asked if the fire had changed him, Boyd said, “Definitely.”

“Sometimes when I drive through the highway, I do have reflections of that night,” he said. “I do have flashes sometimes at night of us driving through there and what could have happened if we didn’t leave.”

He said his family looks out for each other more now, and they volunteer in the community.

“The Albany Fairgrounds took care of us. They gave us clothes, blankets, food, all kinds of stuff. So when we came back to Detroit, my wife and them and us, we volunteered as well to help out for the next needy person,” he said.

Debra Bowman, Beachie Creek

Debra Bowman is another Detroit resident who survived the Labor Day fires.

Like Boyd, she was paying close attention to news about the Beachie Creek fire as it approached Detroit. By Labor Day 2020, Bowman and her husband were gathering their belongings and planning to evacuate with their trailer the following morning.

But that night, as Boyd also recalled, a police officer drove through their neighborhood at midnight with a siren.

“They said, ‘Leave now, take nothing.’ So we piled into the pickup and left,” Bowman said. They only took their dog and a few important documents with them.

“When we were driving down the driveway, I looked up north and it was just a red glow. So I knew that the fire was coming over the ridge above us,” she said.

“I had never seen anything like that in person, only on TV. And we drove through fire on all sides of us. The side of the pickup got burned. We thought the tires were gonna burn off, but thank God they didn’t.”

She said they may have been the very last car in the slow traffic crawl out of town. “If anybody would have stopped, we all would have burned up,” she said.

They went to stay with their daughter in Salem. She booked them a hotel room there that would be their temporary home for the next seven and a half months.

“I think the majority of that motel was full of canyon residents. And in fact, one time when I was taking the dog out, a gal that I had worked with for many years, she was out there too with her dog,” she remembered.

They didn’t find out if their house was still standing for two weeks.

“Finally, when they were able to get up here, they posted a picture and our daughter came over and showed us the picture,” she said.

Their house was still standing.

“We were just so happy,” Bowman said.

Many of their neighbors lost their homes. The Bowmans’ home only needed painting and cleaning from smoke damage.

After more than six months at the motel, water was turned back on in their area and the Bowman family was finally able to go home.

“It was wonderful,” Bowman said. “They were fantastic at the motel. They were absolutely fantastic, but nothing is like home.”

Some of their neighbors chose not to rebuild in Detroit. Bowman said the fire impacted her greatly.

“Every one of us who went through it have PTSD, and I am more grateful than I’ve ever been in my life. There were so many people helping us. It was just unbelievable.”

OPB’s Sheraz Sadiq contributed to this story.

Editor’s note: OPB is exploring the lessons learned and journeys taken since Labor Day 2020, when fires swept across the state. Find all stories in the OPB series “Labor Day fires: Five years later” here. Find additional wildfire resources here.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/09/06/labor-day-wilfires-fire-beachie-creek-almeda-survivors-medford-detroit-phoenix/